Since the 1980s, Japanese anime has been broadcast on Indian television, producing a distinct institutional system for transforming Japanese cultural content for Indian audiences. Yet despite India being one of the world's largest and fastest-growing anime markets, with over 83% of Indian consumers preferring anime over other animated content (JetSynthesys, 2022), India remains almost entirely absent from the global scholarship on anime glocalisation. Drawing on doctoral research in progress at the University of Delhi, this paper argues that Japanese anime in India has been governed by two structurally distinct regimes of glocalisation that produce fundamentally different cultural products from the same source material. The first regime operates through Indian broadcast television, where anime is subjected to an informal two-layer censorship system (Bansal,2025). First through formal state regulation and subsequently through informal broadcaster self-censorship, systematically transforming anime through Hindi dubbing, scene removal, dialogue rewriting, and narrative restructuring, producing what this paper terms Indo-Japanese anime, a distinct hybrid cultural form not previously documented in the existing scholarship on anime glocalisation in India. The second regime operates through subscription OTT platforms under India's Information Technology Rules 2021, presenting anime with minimal institutional intervention and transferring the work of cultural adaptation from the platform to the viewer. The paper develops this comparative argument through selected case studies representing the full spectrum of glocalisation practices across both platforms, making an original contribution to the scholarship on transnational media, broadcast regulation, and Japanese visual culture.

Authors:
Khushboo Bansal, University of Delhi, India

About the Presenter(s)
Khushboo Bansal, PhD researcher, University of Delhi. Interests: anime glocalisation, broadcast censorship, OTT platforms. Current project: comparative study of Japanese anime adaptation on Indian TV and OTT.

Connect on Linkedin
https://www.linkedin.com/in/bansalkhushboo/

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